Articles by Willie Shubert

Did you ever think about the information we can gain from a simple sample of feces? Wildlife researchers have, and the information they obtain from poop samples can tell them…

Meet Heng Kim Seng, Cambodia's bat man. In a few years, he went from rice to riches all because of bats. Under the Khmer Rouge, he hauled human waste to…

ATALAYA, Peru — Pascual cuts the motor and our dugout canoe glides below a massive tree trunk suspended a few feet above the river. I motion to the bank. “We…

NEW YORK CITY — Climate change continues to pose an existential threat to many low-lying Asian and the Pacific island countries, with rising seas putting people’s lives, livelihoods, environment and…

Recent studies of Twitter posts have shown that people can be quick to shrug off extreme weather as normal. However, researchers are also finding that some wildlife — maybe better…

NEW YORK — Today marks the start of protests across the planet as millions witness the youth-led climate strike demanding governments take urgent and transformative action on climate change. Young…

Coral reefs in Hawaiian waters are facing the prospect of another major bleaching event as ocean temperatures rise above the norm. “We found the first signs of [coral] bleaching off…

Earlier this year, the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health published its version of a sustainable diet that could feed the nearly 10 billion people expected to inhabit the…

Emboldened by a right-wing president and congressional approval, a Colombian public-private partnership is working through a licensing process to build a deepwater “megaport” on the country’s northern Pacific coast. Arquimedes…

Don Lizardo was sitting in his hammock, rocking gently back and forth, as he told us heartbreaking stories about working in haciendas when he was younger. We were sitting in…

QUITO, Ecuador — Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park sits in a unique position on the equator, between the Andes mountain range and the Amazon rainforest, which has allowed a rich and…

NAPO, Ecuador — Gloria Ushigua, president of the Sápara women’s association, stops by a large, thin, spindly tree that looks almost dead, and breaks off a thin branch. Running her…

The Brazilian government’s environmental agency, IBAMA, has so far this year imposed the lowest number of fines for illegal deforestation in at least 11 years, while the country’s other leading…

Brazil’s National Congress has overturned changes set by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro that transferred the decision-making power of indigenous reserves demarcation to the Ministry of Agriculture. The move gives that…

“I once asked a Matapí elder if he could spare an hour or two to tell me about what palms he knew, and how he used them,” says Rodrigo Cámara-Leret,…

PALAWAN, Philippines — Twenty years ago, people in this fishing village in the municipality of Quezon, on the Philippine island of Palawan, would just walk to the shore, throw a…

PALAWAN, Philippines — In the wilderness of the Philippines’ southwestern island province of Palawan, dubbed the country’s last biodiversity frontier, lives a scaly mammal found nowhere else on Earth: the…

PUYO, Ecuador — An indigenous community in Ecuador has filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to consult with it before putting its territory up for sale to the…

I grew up in Southern California, just north of Los Angeles, and spent time in nature consistently throughout my childhood. I credit the under-the-radar natural wonderland of Southern California, as…

In January 2018, the Cofán indigenous people of Sinangoe, Ecuador, discovered several machines mining the Aguarico riverbed near Cayambe Coca National Park. This came as a surprise to them because…